Wander and Wonder

I’ve been collecting sunsets, storing them on my shelves, pasting them to the walls and floors of me. Piling them up next to piles of thunderstorms, racks of rainbows, baskets full of full moons, and stacks of sunrises.  In love with the colors of sky and how the light reflects all around.  Scooping up handfuls of colors like Skittles all my life, coloring and painting, wondering why I see what I see there?  Pilots are often in love with the sky, daydreamers always looking up, hiding wonder behind their sunglasses.  I recognize pilot’s eyes even in non-pilots, they hold a luminescent quality.  The tapetum lucidum I’ve written of.  I see them as an internal pilot light of sorts, glowing Sumerian sized eyes wide with awe, reflecting what we’ve seen up close in the sky.   My eyes have been craving snow, and I wanted to know why?

I have always been curiously curious about everything, making me appear more curious than ever, and not caring to hide my curiosity any longer.  Openly looking for answers, teaching myself to write by writing my blog, and sharing the things I learn on my website.  I have been hiding for most of my life, wandering around in my beautiful exile’s on boats and in planes.  Quietly wondering what fog taste like, and what clouds smelled like, why I see purple in the marsh, and what blue feels like in my hands.  I don’t know why I ask the questions I do, but I have accepted that I have a great curiosity that I choose not to hide any longer.  What I’ve learned is as we grow older, we worry more about what people think and how we are perceived, than what we think.  In the subtractive process of aging, we mask over our natural luminescence, hiding the childlike exuberance that let us wear our superhero cape to the grocery, ask a thousand daily questions of why, and tell people we love them, just because we felt like it.  As we grow up we cover up our natural transparency, becoming more opaque.  Dimming wonder down through narrowing eyes of black or white.

With my love of the sky and of color, why was I loving looking at white snow for hours?  I found my answer.  Snow is a group of individual ice crystals arranged together.  When a light photon enters a layer of snow, it goes through an individual ice crystal on the top, which changes its direction and sends it out to another ice crystal, which does the same thing until all the crystals are bouncing light between them, reflecting each other and passing it on.  Ice crystals are very generous it seems.  They reflect all the different light frequencies, all colors of light are shared and bounced back out, not absorbed.  The “color” of all the frequencies in the visible spectrum combined in equal measure is – white.  In understanding this I no longer saw snow as white, but as a frozen light rainbow of infinite color, and it glowed more brilliantly than any rainbow I have ever seen in the sky. The wonder of it all is not the science behind it, or that you agree with me, or even like snow.  It is that I chose to question what I saw, and when I did that, I changed the way I saw.